I bought my first car magazine in 1954 - Motor Trend. If I had taken all the money I've spent on pulpy car magazines over the past 50-plus years and invested it in a good no-load mutual fund, I'd probably have enough money to buy four new Jaguars - top-of-the-line, supercharged Jaguar XKRs!

Aside from Motor Trend, there was Motor Life (I think it went out of business in 1957 or so). Then there was Car Life which went belly-up in the late '50s but was reincarnated by the Road & Track folks in the early 1960s but folded again about ten years later. That's a shame because it was a pretty good mag. Then there's Road & Track itself. I bought R&T regularly from 1957 until 1990. I always enjoyed John R. Bond's technical analyses of engineering advances. Loved reading about exotic imported cars. Or English cars with the fine hide interiors and matched burlwood trim. Or German cars that snicked-snicked precisely through the gears. (Never mind that when I finally bought one of those '70s German cars - a VW Scirocco, I found that it was a real piece of junk as it quickly snicked-snicked its way to oblivion.) Loved reading witty stuff written by Henry Manney III. Then he died. I guess that Henry's death and being snickered at by the Germans kinda soured me on R&T, so I stopped buying it.

Sometimes I bought Hot Rod and Rod & Custom, especially if they had anything about Ed 'Big Daddy' Roth in it. And, of course, Mechanix Illustrated just to read Uncle Tom McCahill. He was a wonderful writer with a great sense of humor and had something new and interesting to say every month. I subscribed Automotive Quarterly because it had outstanding marque stories and photos. Later in life, as I got interested in old cars, I subscribed to Special Interest Autos and Collectible Automobile. But I bailed on them because the ran out of old cars to cover, so they started to write about cars of the 1970s and 1980s. I don't particularly care about that automotive era. I'm sure they did it to appeal to a younger audience, but they lost my interest and my business.

I used to love Motor Trend's spy shots of future cars. Or photos of the latest concept cars from various auto shows. Now I get those things instantly from the Internet or see them the next week in AutoWeek. By the time MT gets around to publishing them, they're old hat. I used to enjoy MT's articles on performance and styling modifications. There used to be lots of ways to do either - in the past, MT offered hundreds of suggestions). Now it offers only two - buy a performance chip or buy new alloy wheels. Who wants to read about that same old stuff every month?! MT used to test cars and an occasional truck. Now it's the other way around. (I'm not particularly interested in trucks, SUVs or vans) So I dropped my Motor Trend subscription a few years back.

So, I'm down to one car magazine. But - thanks to the web, I'm getting more car information than ever. And it's free. Technology rules! (posted 5/17/2005)

Downward Trend: Interlink, the parent of Motor Trend as well as Hot Rod and Automobile has filed for bankruptcy, citing a "decline in decline in advertising spending, especially among automotive companies, as well as rising costs for raw materials."